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And how does this image set to its task immediately after it
comes into being?
By memory of what it has seen?
But it was utterly non-existent, it could have no vision, either
it or the Mother they bestow upon it.
Another difficulty: These people come upon earth not as
Soul-Images but as veritable Souls; yet, by great stress and
strain, one or two of them are able to stir beyond the limits of
the world, and when they do attain Reminiscence barely carry with
them some slight recollection of the Sphere they once knew: on
the other hand, this Image, a new-comer into being, is able, they
tell us- as also is its Mother- to form at least some dim
representation of the celestial world. It is an Image, stamped in
Matter, yet it not merely has the conception of the Supreme and
adopts from that world the plan of this, but knows what elements
serve the purpose. How, for instance, did it come to make fire
before anything else? What made it judge fire a better first than
some other object?
Again, if it created the fire of the Universe by thinking of
fire, why did it not make the Universe at a stroke by thinking of
the Universe? It must have conceived the product complete from
the first; the constituent elements would be embraced in that
general conception.
The creation must have been in all respects more according to the
way of Nature than to that of the arts- for the arts are of later
origin than Nature and the Universe, and even at the present
stage the partial things brought into being by the natural Kinds
do not follow any such order- first fire, then the several other
elements, then the various blends of these- on the contrary the
living organism entire is encompassed and rounded off within the
uterine germ. Why should not the material of the Universe be
similarly embraced in a Kosmic Type in which earth, fire and the
rest would be included? We can only suppose that these people
themselves, acting by their more authentic Soul, would have
produced the world by such a process, but that the Creator had
not wit to do so.
And yet to conceive the vast span of the Heavens- to be great in
that degree- to devise the obliquity of the Zodiac and the
circling path of all the celestial bodies beneath it, and this
earth of ours- and all in such a way that reason can be given for
the plan- this could never be the work of an Image; it tells of
that Power [the All-Soul] next to the very Highest Beings.
Against their will, they themselves admit this: their "outshining
upon the darkness," if the doctrine is sifted, makes it
impossible to deny the true origins of the Kosmos.
Why should this down-shining take place unless such a process
belonged to a universal law?
Either the process is in the order of Nature or against that
order. If it is in the nature of things, it must have taken place
from eternity; if it is against the nature of things, then the
breach of natural right exists in the Supreme also; evil
antedates this world; the cause of evil is not the world; on the
contrary the Supreme is the evil to us; instead of the Soul's
harm coming from this sphere, we have this Sphere harmed by the
Soul.
In fine, the theory amounts to making the world one of the
Primals, and with it the Matter from which it emerges.
The Soul that declined, they tell us, saw and illuminated the
already existent Darkness. Now whence came that Darkness?
If they tell us that the Soul created the Darkness by its
Decline, then, obviously, there was nowhere for the Soul to
decline to; the cause of the decline was not the Darkness but the
very nature of the Soul. The theory, therefore, refers the entire
process to pre-existing compulsions: the guilt inheres in the
Primal Beings.
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